<nettime> RIAA threatens superpimp

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

<http://www.superpimp.org/>

   Pan. A newsreader for GNOME. 
   
     What is PAN?
     
     PAN is a powerful and user-friendly newsreader for the GNOME
     graphical desktop environment. It has many features for easy news
     reading, posting, and downloading binary attachments to articles.
     See the features page for a more detailed list of features.
     
     Pan runs fine under KDE and other desktop environments so long as
     GNOME is installed. See the requirements page for details.
     
     We also have a mailing list.
     
     News
     
     May 18, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Released!
     
     May 18, 2000 - RIAA Demands Decoder be Removed from Pan
   As reported on this page, SuperPimpSoft has been in negotiations with
       the RIAA to settle their lawsuit out of court. The RIAA's
       complaint is that Pan's article attachment decoder could be used
       to decode copyrighted mp3.

       These negotiations have fallen through. The RIAA's final offer is
       that they will drop the suit only if we unbundle Pan's attachment
       decoder from the newsreader. SuperPimpSoft is unwilling to do
       this: the attachment decoder is seamlessly integrated into Pan and
       cannot be removed.

       It's in defense of the right to innovate on behalf of consumers
       that SuperPimpSoft has made the painful decision to endure a
       lawsuit. We simply don't think the RIAA should be involved in
       product design.

       Our decision to stand by our principles would not have been
       financially possible without the help of Andover, which has
       generously pledged the support of their lawyers. (These are the
       same lawyers working with Slashdot on the
       Slashdot/Microsoft/DMCA/Kerberos imbroglio.) Thank You!

       We'll post court dates as soon as we have them. See you in court!
       
     May 17, 2000 - Pan 0.8.0 Released
     
     The article cache file format changed in 0.8.0 beta 7. If upgrading
     from 0.8.0 beta 6 or older, remove ~/.pan/data/yourserver/*.db
     before running this version.
     
     After eight beta releases, this is the first stable release of Pan
     in three months. An incomplete list of changes since Pan 0.7.6:
     
   New Features

 <...>
     * Ability to specify on the fly where attachments should be saved
       (select a group of articles and save to
       incoming/mp3/artist/title/)
 <...>
       
   Updated
     * Updated Danish Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean,
       Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish translations.
 <...>
       
     May 9, 2000 - SuperPimpSoft / RIAA Update
   After our cancelled IPO, and last month's weak round of financing,
       SuperPimpSoft has decided that it does not have the finances
       necessary to fight the RIAA in court. The EFF has also turned down
       our requests for legal aid, claiming that it would be a "PR
       Disaster to back SuperPimps".

       We are currently in negotiations with the RIAA to see if this
       matter can be settled out-of-court. Updates will be posted here on
       the Pan home page.
 <...>
     * New Russian translation
       
   Updated
     * Updated Finnish, French, Italian translations
     * Slightly better memory usage.
 <...>
       
     May 1, 2000 - RIAA Sues SuperPimpSoft
   Spurred on by last week's legal victory against mp3.com, the RIAA
       brought action Monday against software startup SuperPimpSoft.
       SuperPimpSoft's sole product is Pan, a newsreader known to be able
       to decode binary files, including mp3 files from
       alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 newsgroups.

       Lawyers representing the heavy metal band Metallica are said to be
       preparing their own suit against SuperPimpSoft, citing a Metallica
       "flood" that appeared on alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.humor last
       February. Playboy, Hustler, and the anti-piracy coallition
       American Software Producers against Warez commented that they,
       too, are eager to "follow suit."
 <...>
     * Updated Korean and Spanish translations.
 <...>

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